Panos, Owls and Lochs

Sorry for the lax blog posting this week. Other stuff keeps getting in the way!

Anyway, last week was a good one. Off fishing on Wednesday to Loch Lunndaidh in the hills above Golspie, a beautiful location with views out over the Dornoch Firth, great photography and 2 fish caught. Todays first picture comes from there, it’s a 6 shot panorama that’s been stitched in Photoshop and then blasted with lots of contrast.

Originally, we’d planned to go camping on Thursday and Friday, but rain stopped play and we headed off instead to Dunrobin Castle, also near Golspie. The castle itself was a bit of a disappointment for me due to the fact that you couldn’t take photographs inside the castle. No explanation was provided as to why this was the case, and you could take pictures outside. Considering I’m paying to look at their castle, I’m at a loss to understand why I couldn’t photograph it…stupid. Added to which, you only got to see a small part of the Castles interior and whilst what you saw was pretty cool, I would have liked to have seen more…also it wasn’t that interactive, I like picking things up and it just wasn’t like that.

Anyway, the gardens were amazing, brilliant topiary and ornamental stuff, which made for great photographic fodder, also the castle has its own falconer who does a couple of displays every day. These are fantastic, and worth the admission price for that alone. Andy Hughes is charismatic, funny and amazingly knowledgable about birds of prey. He actively hunts game with his birds and they are all incredibly trained and in amazing condition. You can get really close to them and I must have taken about 300 shots of the display and the birds afterwards.

This shot of ‘Plop’ the Barn Owl was taken with my 50-150mm lens, I was trying to get close ups of the owls face so was shooting at an aperture of about f6.0. By complete luck, I managed to keep the face sharp and blur the movement of the wings. I’m really pleased with the shot, but it was more by luck than judgement on my part!

Finally, Friday took us to Loch Achonachie at the top of Strathconon, with the weather improving, we were able to get back out fishing, and the final shot is of our little boat on the shore of the loch. It’s processed using my now fairly standard black and white workflow, I’m quite pleased with it.

The full set from this weeks shooting can be seen on the Picasa stream.

Anyway, off to do some shooting out and about in Inverness tomorrow…hopefully that will bring some nuggets.